Game Details

It's easy to write about games that can be compared to other games. "It's like Call of Duty, but in space," or "It's like Gran Turismo, but all the cars feel like they're made of styrofoam" or "It's like the tabletop game Labyrinth, but you're controlling a monkey in a plastic ball." The games that are the most fun to write about, though, are the ones where you struggle to come up with any suitable comparisons.

Sure, you can draw some links between Antichamber and games like Portal. Both games involve wandering through a sterile laboratory and trying to find your way out. Both involve using a gun that doesn't shoot bullets, but does help you find an exit indirectly. And both take place from a first-person perspective. But Antichamber's similarities to Portal—and to most other games—end there.

Understanding Antichamber means forgetting your understanding of pretty much everything you know about how the physical world works. First to go is the idea of object permanence that you developed as a baby. Turn around in Antichamber, and the hallway that was there a second ago can easily be a totally different room. Then the game starts to mess with your ideas of depth perception—you can fall for miles, only to end up just a few feet below where you started.

In Antichamber, two stairways going different directions can somehow end up in the same place, rooms can have more than four 90-degree corners, glass boxes can have different contents depending on the direction you look at them from, and hallways can somehow end up orthogonal to themselves. And yet it all seems perfectly natural somehow. All the space-bending technology happens seamlessly on the engine level, so you never actually actively see the world glitching out in front of you. It's easier to see in the video above than to explain in words, but hopefully you get the idea.

It sounds like chaos, but it slowly begins to make a strange sort of sense. As you lose yourself in the game's stark black-and-white walls (only occasionally broken by brilliant bursts of color), you begin to link new situations to similar but unique ones you saw earlier in the game. This is especially important when using your block-shooting gun, which starts out as a means to create platforms and hold open doors but soon evolves to shoot self-multiplying blocks that can snake around the room to solve puzzles. Pattern recognition is key, yet every puzzle is unique enough that the solution requires a slight rethinking of what came before it rather than simple repetition.

The best part of Antichamber's design is how it slowly teaches you its particular rules and counterintuitive interactions without once popping up a tutorial or simply telling you what to do. There are some cryptic hints to be found on posters lining the walls, but they usually come after you've already figured out how to solve a puzzle. This design can lead to some frustrating moments—there was one puzzle I fiddled with for a good hour before the solution finally hit me—but it makes it all the more satisfying when you manage to power through the game's own logic (and there are always online walkthroughs if you get too frustrated).

There's also an understated beauty to the game's overall message. There are no non-player characters and no spoken dialogue, but the game's puzzles and explicit messages form a sort of allegory for the nature of existence that is surprisingly powerful. Without giving away too much about the evocative ending, I'll say that the conclusion had me awestruck by its beautiful simplicity and questioning whether the game could have really ended any other way.

Though Antichamber isn't overly long (it took me about eight hours from start to finish), it doesn't feel short, either. It feels complete—a wholly original puzzle game without much filler or any underdeveloped ideas. For those looking for something truly new and unique in indie gaming, this is a must play.

Promoted Comments

Even though the article mentions using a walkthrough, I strongly recommend against it. The game IS the puzzles. If you use a walkthrough you've cheated yourself as you can never get back the opportunity for discovery.

Like the game's creator recommends: if you get stuck on a puzzle, teak a break and let your subconcious figure it out. There were a number of times where I woke up in the middle of the night with a solution to one of the puzzles.

This game is, at times, (enjoyably) mindbending but also somehwat frustrating. One or two concepts that were integral to later solutions were in fact not adequately presented or obvious and too out of reach for casual discovery.

Thanks to online videos (yeah, I cheated) however I had an enjoyably mindbending, if somewhat short, fun experience with this.

Even though the article mentions using a walkthrough, I strongly recommend against it. The game IS the puzzles. If you use a walkthrough you've cheated yourself as you can never get back the opportunity for discovery.

Like the game's creator recommends: if you get stuck on a puzzle, teak a break and let your subconcious figure it out. There were a number of times where I woke up in the middle of the night with a solution to one of the puzzles.

Wish there was a Mac version because I love puzzle games. I saw on the Steam forums that it doesn't work in Parallels, so my only option is to use Bootcamp. I am not going through the hassle of setting up Bootcamp just for one game.

I love this game so much. I think all game designers should play this one, It, to me, is what "gameplay" is all about. I also adored the fictional element to it, I want to find out more!!! I hope for some sort of sequel, in some form.

I'm surprised this game wasn't reviewed sooner. It's been out on Steam since February (technically January, but the 31st...).

I hope this isn't considered spoilerish, but one of the ways the game keeps you from "never actually actively see[ing] the world glitching out in front of you" is by doing things behind your back. If you were the character in the game, I would mean that in the literal sense.

Is the corner thing not obvious? You can't have a room with more than 4 90 degree corners an no greater than 90 degree corners (unless you start getting into some funky curving walls). An L shaped room would technically have 5 90 degree corners and 1 270 degree corners.

Is the corner thing not obvious? You can't have a room with more than 4 90 degree corners an no greater than 90 degree corners (unless you start getting into some funky curving walls). An L shaped room would technically have 5 90 degree corners and 1 270 degree corners.

I picked it up when it came out and dropped it with great prejudice after about four hours. Parts of it were very neat. Parts of it were very obvious - just do exactly what you wouldn't do in any other game. Other parts - the ones that killed the game for me - were poorly explained, if explained at all, and tedious beyond belief. The puzzle that killed the game for me was:

Spoiler: show

The one where you have to build lines of blocks that are of varying lengths and all connect eventually to a single block, which you then take out, causing a chain reaction that will open the door for a split second before everything regenerates. There was a delay between the blocks disappearing and the lights on the door coming on that mislead me into thinking that the solution wasn't actually the solution. I had considered it, and the game convinced me to discard it. Even once I watched a walk through video on how to do it, though, I spent five minutes trying to do it, had one or two blocks wrong, fucked up the whole procedures, and then gave up on the game. Tedious in the extreme, and not the first such puzzle.

There's also the fact that (at least when I played it) you could not remap buttons without doing some ini file editing, and due to the fact that the game is non-Euclidean, trying to find your way around the map to the spots that you haven't beaten yet (which you'll be doing lots of) is an exercise in frustration.

I appreciate what he was trying to do, and I liked a lot about the game, but for me the good was outweighed by the bad. Your enjoyment of the game will likely be directly proportional to your patience. Some will love it, some will hate it. I can be filed under the latter.

The one where you have to build lines of blocks that are of varying lengths and all connect eventually to a single block, which you then take out, causing a chain reaction that will open the door for a split second before everything regenerates. There was a delay between the blocks disappearing and the lights on the door coming on that mislead me into thinking that the solution wasn't actually the solution. I had considered it, and the game convinced me to discard it. Even once I watched a walk through video on how to do it, though, I spent five minutes trying to do it, had one or two blocks wrong, fucked up the whole procedures, and then gave up on the game. Tedious in the extreme, and not the first such puzzle.

Spoiler: show

Actually, that depends on how your minds works. The solution for me was obvious after the first 2 tries, but your motor skills and ingenuity if you do it by a single block is pretty advanced. Doing it by 2 blocks is easier then you might think. Just take out both blocks on either side of the vertical column and boom...

While parts of the game might require fine motor-skills, there are usually several ways to bypass any of the puzzles. The speed run of the game from start->finish is what... 4:53 or something thanks to being able to bypass some things with non obvious use of the mechanics that I don't really think the creators themselves envisioned. Personally, I caught most of the things in fairly good time, except the tiny few that nagged me to no end to find the last 3 signs and finish the last bits of the game. All in all I guess it took around 8 hours being leisurely and trying different solution to already solved games as it progressed.

Personally, I took great enjoyment in beating all except one of the puzzles myself.

Spoiler: show

The single puzzle I couldn't I had to look up because I didn't realize you could raise yourself by standing on a moving block, which in hindsight is of course obvious... DOH!

But then, I'm one of those people that can sit and stair on a wooden trick puzzles for 3 hours concentrated turning it inside itself in my head Before I actually pick it up and solve in with my hands.

But yeah, I had to remap via the ini file and also had to set the resolution for my 30" monitor via ~console so it could be a bit more polished on that side of things.

Kyle's pronunciation of "antichamber" as "ant-eye-chamber" kinda spoils what I assumed was a "pune, or playe on wordes" referencing the word "antechamber". For me (being a Brit), both should be pronounced "ant-ee-chamber".

More on-topic, I saw TotalBiscuit's vid of him playing this while interviewing the creator, and it looked fascinating. I hadn't realised it was out on Steam since earlier this year (my wife having twins in Feb has rather reduced my online time); now that I know it's out, I'll give it a try.

...or not, because I have twins, and thus no time and serious sleep deprivation

I think people can get a little carried away about this and there is often little to no criticism because people are in awe of its originality and admittedly very nifty tricks, (This review didnt really have a review component just a demonstration of how the most basic mechanics work.)

but Antichamber is far from perfect. The completely non-intuitive way the game initially appears to be means you never know when you have run in to a wall.

As others have mentioned some of the puzzles can be very tricky to get around but what hasnt been said is that some are impossible to get around, you simply cant solve them without progressing in some other way.

If the reviewer did use a walkthrough then I can understand why you may never encounter this but of the 6 or 7 hours of my playtime nearly 2 hours of it was spent, not solving a puzzle, not working out the ingenious ways in which something works, but just finding out if I was in the right place at all. (As well as traversing the level to get to other places I had no idea could be passed or not.) Imagine trying to solve a word search but not knowing if you have all the rows of letters, its not fun, not even to someone who loves word searches.*

Dont get me wrong, the initial excitement of Antichambers weird world may take a significant hit from this, and for a time it nearly broke it for me, but things change. As I entered the latter half of the game and my block gun became increasingly powered up, all the paths became viable and things began to flow again. When the game works it really works.

I still agree its a definite buy for puzzle fans, (Some of this design really pushes just how weird a computer generated world can get and will most certainly be used in other games. That alone is enough to sell it to me.) but dont be surprised if being lost in the mid-game seriously slows you down. I suspect quite a few wont make it past it at all.

*The developer was actually aware of this kind of issue fairly early on and has no doubt put a lot of effort in to ironing out confusion where confusion shouldnt exist, but perhaps there are limits to how much he could do.

Kyle Orland / Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area.